A writer who undertakes to discourse on laughter has to encounter more than one variety of irritating objection. He finds to his dismay that a considerable part of his species, which has been flatteringly described as the laughing animal, has never exercised its high and distinguishing capacity. Nay, more, he soon learns that a good many oppose themselves to the practice and are laughter-haters. This kind of person (ὁ μισόγελως) is so possessed with the spirit of seriousness that the opposite temper of jocosity appears to him to be something shockingly wrong. All audible laughter is for him an ill-bred display, at once unsightly as a bodily contortion, and, as a lapse from the gravity of reason, a kind of mental degradation. This estimate of laughter as something unseemly is well represented in Lord Chesterfield’s _Letters_, in which the writer congratulates himself on the fact that since he has had the full use of his reason nobody has ever heard him laugh. In some cases this feeling of repugnance towards mirth and fun takes on more of an ethical aspect. The laugher is identified with the scoffer at all things worthy and condemned as morally bad—a view illustrated in the saying of Pascal: “Diseur de bons mots, mauvais caractère”. Now it seems evident that one who discourses on laughter is bound to notice this attitude of the laughter-hater. If {2} he believes that the moods of hilarity and the enjoyment of the ludicrous have their rightful place in human experience, he must be ready to challenge the monopoly of wisdom claimed by the out-and-out sticklers for seriousness, and to dispute the proposition that the open, honest laugh connotes either a vulgar taste or a depraved moral nature. Perhaps, however, our discourser need not distress himself about these rather sour-tempered laughter-haters. In these days we have to confront not so much opposition as indifference. Instead of the denouncer of mirth as vulgar or wicked, we have the refrainer from laughter, the non-laugher pure and simple. As his Greek name “agelast” (ἀγέλαστος) suggests, this rather annoying type was not unknown in ancient times. In merry England, too, Shakespeare had met with the agelasts who would Not show their teeth in way of smile, Though Nestor swear the jest be laughable. Yet it is only of late that the variety has appeared in its full force. To what scanty proportions in these latter days the band of laughers has dwindled is suggested by the name which is now commonly given them, for “humorist” meant not so long ago an odd fellow or “eccentric”. Indeed, one of our living writers suggests that “as the world becomes more decorous humour becomes tongue-tied and obsolete”.[1]